


A Creature of the Abstract

by rachelindeed



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Weeping Angel Sherlock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 15:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3734284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When one cannot see, one has to observe.  </p><p>(Doctor Who fusion: Sherlock as a Weeping Angel.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Creature of the Abstract

**Author's Note:**

> If you are not familiar with the Weeping Angels and how they work, I've included a few quotations from Doctor Who in the end notes which explain their main characteristics.

When he could not see, he had to _observe_.

There was a world beyond the palms of his hands. He lowered them and looked more often than he should, but sight was ultimately unreliable. His body was its own millstone, ready to weigh, pin, and blind him.

He could stare from the unobserved corner. He could move in the blink of an eye, but London had too many eyes. He lived much of his life in rictus, graven hands shielding his face. His instincts were archaic, their protection thoroughly outmoded, but evolution had granted him no choice.

In the sight of any living creature, he turned to stone.

An inconvenience, yes, but he’d divorced himself from his primitive biology long ago. Leaden transport couldn’t stop his mind. It, too, was winged.

He had studied sound and scent for centuries. He’d mapped acoustic subtleties, breathed in varieties of fumes (traffic and gardens and sickness and restaurant kitchens) until there was not a footfall which did not place itself in his Mind City. He could judge the distance, direction, speed, and weight of any objects in hearing radius by a calculus that had grown so simple over the years that it scarcely occupied conscious thought anymore. 

More interesting were the logical deductions he could build upon the basic sensory data. The rustle of a takeaway bag, the smell of engine grease, the clink of a dog tag introduced him to lawyers, mechanics, and soldiers who shed their personal histories like the breadcrumbs of Grimm fairytales. He was their monster, he supposed, stalking the trails behind them with ravening intellect.

He did experience physical hunger as well. Not often. He barely attended his body, left it to starve for long stretches of mental exultation, but eventually his features began to weather and his fingers cracked. He possessed sufficient vanity to eat before allowing himself to actually crumble. He was not a particularly discriminating hunter, but he generally profiled the restless and unattached.

Junkies became something of a habit. There was always one to hand in London alleys, convenient. He sent them off to live rapidly to death a hundred and thirty years past, and the scant, laced taste of their lost potential tided him over from year to year. He had more important matters to attend to.

After a century in London, the invention and city-wide installation of CCTV proved incredibly useful. The image of an Angel was itself an Angel, in one of the few tech-adaptable quirks of his nature, so he could plant himself in visual range of any building with security cameras and burst out of their monitors at his leisure. He became a local landmark across the street from New Scotland Yard and drove their IT staff to distraction with blackouts and false alarms that cleared the offices for him when he needed to consult. 

The NSY monitors projected his astral body, which was bad with pens but good with computers. DI Lestrade got dozens of anonymous tips online, not to mention unsolicited observations about his personal life and increasingly fervent orders to sack Anderson in forensics.

Sherlock couldn’t always be bothered to stay in place outside the Yard. He vanished for the sake of cases, experiments, and general boredom. He had bolt-holes all over London, but St. Bart’s was akin to a second home. The morgue provided abundant organic material for study, and he was not above borrowing a set of vocal chords from a fresh corpse when a human voice could aid his investigations. Generally, though, he preferred to text.

He took a certain reckless pleasure in collecting his biological and chemical samples during the slow blinks of the lab techs who worked the graveyard shift. Sleep-deprived and hunched over their microscopes, their eyelids stuttered whenever they glanced up –- three, four blinks on average before they could properly focus. He moved far too fast to be in real danger and could almost instantly drain the power from the lights if he ran into the blank stares of the chronically over-caffeinated. He perched up on the roof when daylight and the influx of the morning shift made further movement impossible.

Whenever he reappeared at the Yard, the so-called investigative professionals across the street circulated new rounds of flimsy theories. Crazy med students, they said, piss drunk but still wildly ambitious, stealing two-tonne statues as if they were garden gnomes. But how on earth did they get the bloody thing up to the roof of St. Bart’s and back again? Was it even the same statue every time? There were a dozen websites devoted to working out how the trick was done.

Sherlock avoided others of his kind as far as possible. There weren’t all that many in the city; the human traffic was too dense. Most sane Angels chafed at spending the majority of their time quantum-locked. The London crowd developed a reputation for something...less than sanity. They were _showy_ , a paradoxical and near-suicidal trait. Angels who were looking for more than a meal looked to London, but ever afterwards they had to take great care not to look to each other.

Mycroft was the only kin Sherlock acknowledged, and that reluctantly. He lived on the lawn of 10 Downing, by the fountain. He was covered with lichen and never moved an inch, too busy projecting himself through the cameras and into back rooms, running the country from his unobserved corners. He bored Sherlock to tears.

But when Sherlock had been a child Mycroft had taken his hand. They had never seen each other, eyes clenched shut in self-defense, but to this day Sherlock could remember the way their fingers had caught, flexible and alive so long as no one looked. In the dark behind their eyelids, they were brothers. 

It was Mycroft who’d brought him to London after he had run mad in the safe, hateful emptiness of the countryside. Here, he had his work and he had his mind. That was quite enough to be getting on with.

~~

_Human error_

The day he met John Watson, Sherlock made a mistake.

It was late January, and the roof of St. Bart’s was freezing. Sherlock’s wings were feathered in frost and icicles trailed down his fingers where they clamped across his eyes. The access door from the stairwell opened and he catalogued auditory data automatically. That soft thud was the rubber tip of a cane beating out an uneven tempo. Sherlock’s ear was precise and he confidently averaged the stride at 0.4 to 0.6 meters per step. A woman, then, or a short man. Was the limp permanent?

The footfalls advanced heavily but fast. Odds were highest on a frightened woman, or an angry one. But next came quiet cursing, ah, always something, a short man it was instead, and angry.

The curses were interesting. He’d never heard Urdu edged with the barest trace of a Scottish brogue. There was a northerner in that voice, with roots in Inverness or Elgin. A childhood of ruined castles and monsters in the Loch, perhaps, the kind of romantic rot that led to misadventures in Pakistan –- to Queen and country and Urdu with epenthetic vowels. 

The man propped his cane against Sherlock’s leg and lit a cigarette. He smoked quickly and the faint sounds of the rooftop gravel painted his posture in Sherlock’s mind. He stood like he couldn’t forget the limp completely, wavering slightly on his back foot. Combined with the cane and the unique vulgarities, a soldier was emerging, well-travelled and likely injured in active combat. Afghanistan or Iraq?

For two minutes there was nothing but the soft sound of burning, the man’s smoke indistinguishable from his breath in the cold. Sherlock could see the white plumes in his mind, though he could not look.

Then, unexpected, came hands. Bare, cold, distinctively calloused (ah, there, a surgeon as well as a marksman). Hands wrapped around Sherlock’s, slipping into the narrow space between his cupped palms and his eyes. The man’s middle fingers brushed Sherlock’s nose on both sides. Pool halls hid in the crook of his thumb where he’d held the cue -- late nights and high stakes.

For a moment, Sherlock felt his interest catch.

“Please God,” the man said. “Let her live.”

Ah, dull. Sherlock found the religious connotations of his wings unfailingly tedious.

The man did not go on. Just stood for a moment, then sighed and grasped Sherlock’s arm for support. His left leg had an intermittent muscle tremor and Sherlock could feel micro-shifts of balance and strain through his back and arm as he compensated.

“Sorry,” the man said, abruptly casual. “Did it for myself, so, yeah, for my patient. You understand.”

It took a moment, in fact, for Sherlock to understand; Angels rarely got apologies for prayers. Gloveless fingers moved from Sherlock’s arm onto his wing. The cold likely hurt them, at least a little.

“You’ve got yourself a reputation, you know, with that vanishing trick. The interns are all blogging about it. Worst tenant in London, popping in at all hours and gone again without a word.” The man huffed and his eyes briefly closed. Sherlock could feel the cage of his body unlock, freedom of movement suddenly there beneath the stone.

“John?”

Trapped again –- a second pair of eyes were on the roof. A nurse, it must be, calling from the stairwell. Sherlock couldn’t identify this one by voice, as the day shift were not his regulars. A former smoker, though, who had lived in Leeds.

“Yeah, thanks. I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Actually, Mike asked me to give you this, told me you might be up here. He put a rush on it, said you’d want to see the results straight away.”

The nurse half-sprinted across the roof (must not have bothered to retrieve her coat before coming up) and made a silent hand-off before retreating back downstairs. Out of sight, Sherlock’s limbs were his own again. The doctor -- 'John,' apparently -- was entirely focused on the patient file in his hands and left Sherlock unobserved.

Sherlock heard the rustle as John flicked the report open and was struck by a very stupid impulse.

He was bored. The whole idle day stretched ahead of him; he wasn’t getting off this roof for hours. No doubt the medical case in that file was utterly unspectacular. It didn’t take a mystery to wring prayers from a surgeon, just blood and bad odds, but that was something. There was likely a major wound involved, and probably some decent photographs.

It was broad daylight, and he was less than a meter from a combat veteran who might be hyper-sensitive to movement. This was a terrible idea. But denying himself stimulus was too painful to contemplate. Besides, people were idiots and they could be relied on to explain away the inexplicable. If anything went wrong, a former soldier at high risk for PTSD would write it off as his mind playing tricks.

Sherlock lowered his hands from his face and glanced down at the file.

The tab was labeled ‘Norbury, Y.F.,’ freshly inked by a left-handed public schooler. There were photographs behind the lab report John was consulting, if he would just lift his page a little higher…the one corner of the image visible seemed to place the major trauma near the fifth intercostal space…

Sherlock couldn’t move.

Unfortunate, but not cause for panic. In a second, shock would set in and John would blink. Sherlock had unbelievable speed, it would be the work of a fractional moment to set his hands back in place.

Two seconds passed. Three. Four.

John did not blink.

Five. Six.

This was a bit not good, then.

Seven. Eight.

Apparently John responded to shock with stillness, calm, and absolute focus (should have anticipated that, stupid, _stupid_ ). This was getting serious, every moment John spent focused on his face would make these memories harder to dismiss and, god, he was reaching up. Multiple senses were getting involved now, he was prodding at a cheekbone.

Eleven seconds in total, and then John finally lowered his eyes to fish out his phone to take a picture. When he looked back up Sherlock’s face was firmly covered and his whole structure exuded the reassurance of innocent, immovable stone.

Another ten seconds passed.

“That. Was. Amazing.”

Sherlock heard the click as John took a photo, and then the man giggled. He sounded like he’d shed twenty years.

“Seriously, that was…quite extraordinary. Made my day, to be honest. Possibly my week. That’s it, then?”

Sherlock stood silent.

“My god. You actually think that’s going to work.” John laughed again, short and sharp but no less delighted. His weight shifted, and from the sound of it he was angling himself slightly downwards, tilting to see if he could get another glimpse of Sherlock’s face through the narrow gaps between stone fingers. Then he straightened. 

“Look, okay. We don’t know a thing about each other, but after _that_ …well. I know you’re for real. John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, that’s a start, from my end. Thing is, my brain and my eyes are close to all I’ve got. You’re, uh, not going to make me believe that they told me a lie. So. There.”

He looked at Sherlock a moment more, then tucked his phone in his pocket, retrieved his cane and maneuvered across the roof and onto the stairs. 

“I’ve got a patient, I may have mentioned, but do me a favor and stick around till I get back.”

John’s footsteps faded.

Well, then. This was going to require some thought.

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes from Doctor Who episode _Blink_ : 
> 
> "Fascinating race, the Weeping Angels. The only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely. No mess, no fuss, they just zap you into the past and let you live to death. The rest of your life used up and blown away in the blink of an eye. You die in the past, and in the present they consume the energy of all the days you might have had, all your stolen moments. They're creatures of the abstract. They live off potential energy."
> 
> "The Lonely Assassins, that's what they used to be called. No one quite knows where they came from, but they're as old as the Universe, or very nearly. And they have survived this long because they have the most perfect defense system ever evolved. They are quantum locked. They don't exist when they are being observed. The moment they are seen by any other living creature they freeze into rock. No choice, it's a fact of their biology. In the sight of any living thing, they literally turn into stone. And you can't kill a stone. Of course, a stone can't kill you either, but then you turn your head away. Then you blink. Then, oh yes, it can. That's why they cover their eyes. They're not weeping, they can't risk looking at each other. Their greatest asset is their greatest curse. They can never be seen. Loneliest creatures in the Universe."


End file.
